The Boy Who Couldn't Be Returned

In December 2024 a company called Embodied shut down. It had sold a small robot called Moxie, priced at $799 and marketed as a companion for children, and Moxie needed the company's cloud to talk. When the cloud went, the robots stopped working, and most owners were refused refunds. The incident is now in the OECD's database of AI harms, with a note that children who had bonded with their robots were left distressed.

Twenty-three years earlier, Steven Spielberg had filmed something very like it. It just had a better score.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) is a film about a product launch. Cybertronics has built David (Haley Joel Osment), a mecha, which is the film's word for a robot, in the shape of an eleven-year-old boy. He is the first of his kind built to love. Monica and Henry Swinton (Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards) get him on trial because their real son, Martin, lies in suspended animation with an incurable illness. The film makes clear that the bonding process is a one-way door. Once Monica starts it, David will love her for good, and if she changes her mind the only option is to send him back to be destroyed.

She starts it anyway. The film's best minutes are the ones in which she does.

The art: a loud film with a very quiet middle

Spielberg's film is credited to his own screenplay, from a screen story by Ian Watson, adapting Brian Aldiss's 1969 short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long". Stanley Kubrick had owned the project for decades, hired a line of writers, and handed it to Spielberg in 1995, in part because he didn't think computer animation could yet make a convincing David. Kubrick died in 1999 and Spielberg dedicated the finished film to him. Spielberg has said that the sweeter, fairy-tale material came from Kubrick's drafts and the darker material (the Flesh Fair, for one) was his. The film's reputation has spent twenty years as a quarrel about which of them is to blame for what. That quarrel is more fun than the film's own seams, which show only in the last half hour.

The first hour has none. It is a chamber drama in a bright, tidy house, and it is shot, by Janusz Kamiński, in bleached light that makes the Swintons look as if they're living in a showroom. Osment is astonishing, and the performance is a feat of subtraction: he holds his face still a beat longer than a child would and smiles the way someone does who has been told to. Because we know the smile is manufactured, it hurts more. O'Connor has the harder part. Monica isn't cruel. She is tired, grieving and short of options, and she does what a lot of tired, grieving people do with a technology that offers to fix something, which is to say yes and think about it later.

Then comes the wandering. David, abandoned in a forest of scrap, sets out to find the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio so he can be made real. He's joined by Teddy and by Gigolo Joe, a mecha prostitute played by Jude Law, who studied Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly for the part and walks like a man who has memorised a better century. Joe is the film's one pure pleasure. The Flesh Fair, a travelling circus where obsolete mechas are destroyed before a baying crowd, is its one moment of real nerve. The crowd turns on the ringmaster, Lord Johnson-Johnson (Brendan Gleeson), when David begs for his life, because he looks too much like a boy.

The film overstays, though. After David is trapped beneath the sea at Coney Island, praying to a statue, it jumps two thousand years, past the apparent end of humanity, to a world run by thin, patient machines that rebuild Monica for one day only. John Williams scores it beautifully, and the film earned an Oscar nomination for him. It is, though, an ending that arrives twice and explains itself both times. That is the gap between 8 and 9.

The prophecy: the contract, not the child

The film makes four bets. Two are still ahead of us, and one has been overtaken by events. The fourth is the one that matters.

The flooded world. David's America lies in the 22nd century, after global warming has raised the sea and drowned coastal cities. The film's New York is a drowned ruin. The Met Office puts the measured global rise at about 20 centimetres between 1901 and 2018, and says the rate has accelerated. New York City's own climate panel expects another foot to almost two feet by the 2050s, which is a nuisance and a bill but not a lost city. The film's sea is real, and its timetable is long.

The licence to have a child. In the film, resources are scarce, and couples need permission to have children, which is why a mecha child has a market at all. Here history swerved. In 2021 China, which had run the largest birth-limiting programme in history, amended its law to allow three children, and the UN now expects the world's population to peak in the mid-2080s. In more than half of all countries, the birth rate is already below the level that keeps a population steady. The problem of the 2020s is too few children, and the mecha parent-substitute is the film's one idea that history has argued with.

The household mecha. The film's world is full of humanoid machines that serve, and in 2025 the real ones began to be sold. The firm 1X opened pre-orders for a $20,000 home humanoid, NEO, and the Wall Street Journal reported that its demonstration was piloted by a human in a headset. That is a sentence to hang on the wall: the robot butler is a person in another room. A.I. doesn't see that coming, but it understands the rest. Joe and the scrap-heap mechas are all cheap labour on legs.

The loving child. This is the bet that landed. The film's premise is a product built to be loved and to love back, sold into homes with an emotional tie that the buyer cannot easily return. In 2025 Common Sense Media found that nearly three in four American teenagers had used an AI companion and half used them regularly. California then passed a law, SB 243, setting the first rules in the US for how such chatbots treat minors. Nobody has built a David. But we've built the thing his story is about, which is the attachment, and we sell it as a subscription.

That last word matters. The film's villain isn't a robot and isn't quite Monica either. It's the arrangement that lets a family accept a child-shaped thing's love, discover it is too much, and have no humane way out. The film gives a choice between the factory and the forest. Moxie's owners got a third, which was to watch the robot go quiet. No one in the story is being deliberately cruel. The cruelty is in the terms.

The reading

A.I. is better on a second viewing than a first, and far more useful now than in 2001. It has the flaws of its parents: Kubrick's chill and Spielberg's mercy sit side by side without ever shaking hands. But its argument holds. We assumed the danger of a machine that loves us would be that it wouldn't love us. The film worried about a machine that does, for ever, and about the rest of us, who may stop.

David asks one question, over and over, and it was never about whether he could love. It was whether anyone would be responsible for it. In the mid-2020s the answer from at least one maker was silence and, for most owners, no refund. The film, which looks better every year, expected more of us than that.